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Are U.S. Christian Fundamentalists Stoking War In The Middle-East?

Sensitive? Perhaps.... but mainly because I grow weary of idealogues of one stripe bashing OTHERS as idealogues, or those with preconceived opinions re groups of folks bashing OTHERS as having bigotries. Not pointing at you here, merely reflecting on the overall tone on this board whenever certain topics (Christianity, for one) are raised...

And Annasdottir, your post STILL suggests that, absent a deity or deities, a right or wrong that transcends man, one should be no better than one has to be to insure benefits to oneself. You basically assert that the reason one should "do good" is because if we were ALL bad, we would all be worse off. Hmmm...

Take the taxes thing... you can certainly make the case that if we ALL cheated on our taxes, we would ALL be worse off for it. BUT... your "moral model" simply suggests that what I should do is campaign HARD for everyone to pay their taxes, suggest it is moral, etc, etc...and then cheat like mad MYSELF if I could get away with it. For example, if I COULD get away with not paying my school taxes after my kids graduated, I should... since my only concerns are practical.

Similarly, take your ambulance example... again, I would certainly want to campaign for everyone to respect the right of way of emergency vehicles - after all, as you correctly point out, I may need one one of these days! - BUT... I have NO reason not to cut one off, etc, when I am NOT the occupant. I just would prefer that YOU don't do so.

All you suggest is that I should not be dishonest or selfish because if EVERYONE did that, I would be worse off... the logical answer to that is that I should campaign for my neighbors to be "suckers" (of course, I would not say that openly, but would rather praise their morality, etc) while acting for MY benefit in every case I could. This is, of course, the position most "evil" or "bad" people adopt - have you ever really known a cheat, in sports, business, etc, who wasn't offended when OTHERS cheated? ;)

So, I don't know you have really convinced me that you stand for anything except self-interest...which means that I should seek to have my neighbors be as altruistic as possible, while getting away with as much as I possibly can (while avoiding punishment and being found out!).

Shadow
 
Shadow,
with all due respect... I suggest you take it to Oll's thread 'How do Atheists think' and tell em just how athiests,in your humble opinon do think

8¬)
 
The question remains is there a group of people who believe that the End-time (Rapture, Judgement day whatever you want to call it) will be brought forward by assisiting the Jewish state in it's current actions. I believe the answer is yes. The next question is do they have influence in Washington? IMO the answer is again yes but not as much as the Israeli lobby.

Are these people Xtian? They believe so but the deity they espouse is so arbitrary, bigoted and unjust that if, by some insignificant chance, they are right I would want to be on the other side.

On the question of morals, why is a deity needed for morals? Buddists don't need one, nor do Taoists, nor for that matter do Humanists.
 
Spot on, Intaglio. A diety is only needed to help designate "Us" from "Them". You certainly don't need one to derive morals from. What Shadow is talking about is just another version of 'the prisoner's dilemma'.

Recent research into how people negotiate seems to indicate that there are some culturally determined aspects to what approach people adopt. However, one constant is that it pays to treat your fellow negotiator with respect until they are found to be playing tricks for their sole advantage. Then you can adopt the same approach in a payback until they can be convinced that mutual co-operation produces the optimal outcome for all players.

So, in general Shadow, objective (heh! heh! - funny word) :eek!!!!: research supports the idea that "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" is actually a good strategy to adopt in negotions. And daily life is just so full of negotiation, n'est ce pas? :miaow:
 
dot23 said:
well they must be fairly bothered about opec as they tried to depose the president of venezuela, they're trying to depose the leader of Iraq, and the Afghan conflict seems to have been about taliban recalcitrance on the caspian sea pipeline.

loons the lot of em - yet more reason never to buy a car.
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And they'll continue to be bothered about (and by) OPEC for the short and medium term. I'd imagine there's a shedload of red tape, manouvering and plenty more groundwork before former mortal enemies jump into bed with each other. Russian "law" is not terribly well defined yet. So Iraq and Venezuela are important in the here and now, though I'm betting the US administration can't wait to wash its hands of the ME as it'll no longer have anything it wants.
I still don't buy the Afghan pipeline business just yet, though it does seem mightily convenient. I cannot believe a major terrorist incident would be staged or egged on in order to achieve this.
Anyway, I digress....
 
I don't think the terrorism thing has had to be staged for the afghan pipeline thing to be true. They just needed to blame it on Bin Laden and Afghanistan, that was enough.
 
News today! Lends so credence to the 'lesser evil' scenario where the US Gov thought it was just going to be a straight hi-jacking.

Bush warned over hijackings...

Text: (edited to get rid of extraneous text and audio links on original page)

President George W Bush put US security agencies on alert last summer after receiving intelligence reports that Osama Bin Laden was planning to hijack American aircraft.

The alert was revealed by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who said that the information was passed to the president during routine intelligence briefings and the "appropriate agencies" were notified.


The US intelligence community has already been heavily criticised for its failure to detect warning signs of the 11 September suicide attacks on New York and Washington.

The attacks, which saw hijacked aircraft flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are believed to have been carried by Bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror group.

However, Mr Fleischer said the information received by the president dealt with conventional hijackings - not the use of planes as missiles to attack buildings.

"We had general threats involving Osama Bin Laden around the world and including in the United States," he said.

BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb says the timing of this admission is significant, as a congressional committee is about to start hearings into intelligence failings before 11 September.

The White House did not want to be put on the defensive with leaks about what the president knew, our correspondent says.

Flight school warning

Meanwhile, the White House has denied that a memo last July from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Arizona office could have prevented the attacks had it been acted on.

The memo is reported to have warned that groups like al-Qaeda might have sent students to flight schools in the US, but none of the people identified in the document had any connection with the attacks.


Even though the memo was reviewed, the FBI did not take any action on its central recommendation - that flight school records and visa applications by foreign students be cross-referenced.

And the agency did not connect the memo with the case of Zacharias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who was arrested in August after seeking flight training in Minnesota - and saying he was not particularly interested in learning to land aeroplanes.

Mr Moussaoui is now on trial in the US, accused of conspiring with Bin Laden, the hijackers and others to commit the 11 September attacks.

The FBI Director, Robert Mueller, has repeatedly said he wished agents had acted more aggressively in putting the Arizona and Minnesota leads together.

Following the attacks, the FBI is to create a special counter-terrorism unit to oversee all its terrorism investigations.

A Washington-based "super-squad" will be made up of hundreds of agents and analysts, as well as an office of intelligence, headed by a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
 
As to the attack on Afghanistan being oil-driven... guess we are back to Bush and the "Jews" crashing those planes into the WTC, eh?
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Shadow - there's a great deal that ties the afghan conflict (phase x) to oil.
US pledges support for Afghan oil pipeline if Taliban makes peace admittedly it's old, but I've read more recent stories about discussions between the taliban and the US about pipelines.

Also there were articles in several papers indicating the new leader, Hamid Karzai, as a consultant to unocal. I haven't had time to find a good source for this but here's a link to a story about unocal in afhanistanAfghanistan plans gas pipeline

I must admit I found one page that claimed it had recieved a letter from unocal refuting that Karzai was ever affiliated - maybe someone with more time on their hands could find out whether this is just a UL?

I have suggested elsewhere on these pages that it is a possibility that the US had something to do with the 911 stuff - however I'm more inclined to think that they're just using obl/taliban as a patsy to escalate the retaliation against 'terrorists'. It's a lot easier for people to believe in an evil mastermind (thanks 007) than to think their could be a loose affiliation of like minded people all over the world who shuffle money, arms and information in the general hope that some of it will find people nuts enough to take action against US interests. The very fact that their are probably hundreds of banned terrorist groups all over the world (wither the attacks on somalia?) including hamas, jumiyatt i islamiya, islamic jihad, etc etc shows that even if ultimately OBL was responsible for the cash it's unlikely he masterminded the operation - sheer logistics would make that pretty difficult.

Has anyone thought about the fact that Al-qaida means 'the base' btw? That would suggest that it is a grounding organisation that provides basic military training, not one that oversees all international terrorism. If people trained in the AQ camps in afganistan, somalia etc choose to go out and blow up US interests does that mean that OBL set those objectives? This isn't like the military as we know it, it's a cellular organisation which doesn't *neccessarily* have a pyramidal strcuture.

Right this is all far too off-thread, I'll shut up now :)
 
Dot, I think you'll find that "The Base" is more of a reference to getting back to "that old time religion". And I recall seeing in a western source it carries a reference to the Ismaelis (Hashishim, Assassins).
 
the hoary head of hassan-i-sabbah rises from the mountain....
 
I think that what OBL really wants is to take over Saudi Arabia, and if the US chose to favour him, as opposed the current despots in charge, he would be happy to take their assistance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the elusive Mr Laden was already in Saudi plotting a coup.
 
Shadow said:
(3) I have yet to see a truly convincing explanation as to why, if there is NO God or gods, no afterlife, etc., any of us should bother to be anything but selfish. The most commonly offered rationale seems to be "How would you like it if someone did X to YOU?"... but really, isn't that just a code for the weak and squeamish? I mean, if right and wrong are just "fashions", why not look out for you and yours, do whatever is necessary to further those ends, and put it to everyone else?Shadow
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I took the above as a statement of your personal beliefs; my argument about self-interested altruism was meant to show you that you don't have to act like a selfish b*****d to further your own interests. It wasn't a statement of my own way of behaving just a teaching illustration.
 
chatsubo said:
I think that what OBL really wants is to take over Saudi Arabia, and if the US chose to favour him, as opposed the current despots in charge, he would be happy to take their assistance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the elusive Mr Laden was already in Saudi plotting a coup.
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Methinks that would require too much of a volte face for even the most opportunisitc politico... It would take a huge amount of spin to take 'ITWASHIM!ITWASHIM!ITWASHIM!ITWASHIM!ITWASHIM! ooops we were wrong it wasn't... sorry ' and make it wash with the public

8¬)
 
hmmm Saddam? 'he's our boy alright, good guy, tough with the locals, a little too excitable, but he's our man, better than that crazy old bearded guy over the border - oops no he's a crazed homicidal maniac and we must kill him, he's a complete loon, compared with that bearded guy over theboarder... etc'

However, I can imagine an other member of the bin Laden clan taking over Saudi. I dunno, they may be too keen on sharia and not avers to torturing people for drinking alcohol, but I quite like the Crown Prince, at least he had the balls to say Bush was a deadhead, even if it was in diplomatic language :)
 
dot23 said:
at least he had the balls to say Bush was a deadhead, even if it was in diplomatic language :)
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There was a top Mirror headline about Bush getting warning about 9/11. A big picture of Dubya looking thick under the headline 'Failure of Intelligence'.
 
Has anyone else noticed the program to bring Gadafi (Libya) back to nice guy status has begun?
 
intaglio said:
Has anyone else noticed the program to bring Gadafi (Libya) back to nice guy status has begun?
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Well, there's a lot of oil. Plus Libya could be a useful ally in controlling the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa
This probably should be on another thread but I do think the Lockerbie convinctions were dubious. Private Eye, and in particular, Paul Foot, has a lot of good evidence implicating the Iranian secret service.
 
I think that you always have to be a bit wary of pulling "oil" into these things as a motive. Any attempt to bring about an Israeli/Palestinian peace could be interpreted in exactly the same way. Likewise the French attempt to loosen the sanction regime on Iraq.

Too be honest, though, I still think that an equally good "oil" case could be made for OBL. Not only does he want to depose (and presumably replace with himself) the Saudi leadership (not short of a bit of oil), but he also had a rather good thing going in Afghanistan (which has been the subject of a lot of "oil" speculation.) As you can see, "oil" could be used to explain pretty much anything going on in the middle east and surrounding area.

Just a few random thoughts...
 
Eerrrr....reckon I can bring it up.

Note of interest: The only lands in the Middle East that are OIL-FREE is currently called Israel.
 
talking of which - does the big I have any natural resources to speak of? Apart foreign late teen labour :rolleyes:
 
Israel has the handcuffs firmly on the water supply. This century the big struggle will be over the aquifer!
 
That's right.

And for those who cannot see the obvious living metaphor, repeat after me...

AFTER ALL, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT OIL AND WATER DON'T MIX


Thank you, thank you. Next show at 11. Don't forget to tip your waitress...
 
Frost said:
Eerrrr....reckon I can bring it up.

Note of interest: The only lands in the Middle East that are OIL-FREE is currently called Israel.
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Which is further proof of God's sick sense of humour - yeah, I'll give you a brand new Promised Land, the only part of the Middle East that hasn't got oil.
 
Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but I haven't ready all the pages in this thread. I read in the Independant or Guardian that many christian 'extremists' went on the pro-israel demo in London the other week, they said they were supporting Israel and Amerikkka because their policies are imenantizing the eschaton.(bringing about the end of the world with speed.)
 
link al?

As has been noted before on this thread there's a freaksome alliance between ultra-zionists and born-againers that seems very peculiar to most religion watchers. Despite huge religious, moral and historical differences, these two groups (pejoratively in the US, although also in europe and the mideast) have become a politcal force to be reconned with. Their combined lobbying power is almost on an equal footing with the oil and arms industries, and when foreign policy is based on religious decision making (especially between two groups who's be naturally opposed at any other point in history I suspect) we really have to start worrying.
 
Yes, and this is exactly what Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church wants!!!

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/moon.html



rv_mrs.moon_titlpge.jpeg
 
XTIANS

Just a little precisation about the use of the X in christians;it's not used to denigrate or such the christian faith but it's simply used to abbreviate.
In fact the letter X in the greek alphabet is read CHI ergo X(chi)tians :D
 
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